Owners, players will squabble over millions

DALLAS -- The battle lines between billionaire and millionaire have been drawn in the National Football League.

It reminds me of the family spat between greedy cousins when the filthy rich uncle passes away and all is not divided equally in the will. Everybody just doesn't want what's coming to them: They want more.

The NFL isn't just another business. It's an obscenely successful business. It operates the No. 1 television franchise in the world, not just in sports, in viewership. It pays its players on non-guaranteed contracts, the only major North American sport to get away with this. And on Sunday, it will conclude the most successful financial season in the history of sport. Any sport.

"The most watched season in history," commissioner Roger Goodell called it Friday at his annual state of the union press conference. "There has never been a better time to be a fan of the NFL."

That was Friday. On Monday, after the Super Bowl is over, the only football talk you may hear between then and March 4 will be labour-related. And we know how much fans love that.

Almost everybody in football agrees, a player lockout is looming. Apparently, what Goodell calls the most successful season and the most watched season and the most profitable season in history isn't enough to placate his owners. They worry that their players are taking home too much of their profits. They worry that the game isn't growing, when virtually every piece of evidence indicates the opposite. To their credit, they don't cry poor and whine, say, the way Gary Bettman cried poor when the National Hockey League locked out its players and lost a season of hockey. Goodell is far smoother, eloquent and on message than Bettman could ever be. He's not crying poor, he's crying reason.

"This isn't about the next three months," Goodell said. "This is about the next 10 years."

There are, it seems two kinds of teams in the NFL: Rich and richer.

Nobody really has to sell a ticket to break even. The television revenue on a team-by-team basis is that extreme. Two small-market teams, the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers, will play Sunday for the Super Bowl. So their complaint is?

The players are getting too much of the pie. More than 50%, the owners claim. Typically, the players dispute the numbers. The league wants to make a deal that lessens the players' overall share of revenues, in what they say is a more manageable view of the future.

This is a new NFL. Time was, the league was built on a concept called league share. What was good for one team, was good for everybody. That meant, and still means, that the Green Bays and Buffalos on the landscape, are supposed to be able to compete with New York and Chicago. And historically, that has happened. But what is changed is that an independent-minded owner such as the Dallas Cowboys' Jerry Jones found he could maximize his team's revenues, and those weren't shared 32 ways. It meant Dallas and Washington and thee teams with new stadiums and new revenue streams were dwarfing their own partners.

So rather than go after each other and stick to the model former commissioner Pete Rozelle built, the attack is on player compensation. A rookie salary cap is certain to be brought to the league and so it should be. The way the draft operates now, with first-round picks getting enormous money before proving themselves, is terribly flawed. The league wants to trim the rookies, extend the regular season to 18 games from 16 (thus eliminating two impossible-to-sell pre-season games), and claw back player salaries significantly.

Translation: The owners want to pay players less money to play more games. That's not going to fly with anybody -- even prominent owners like Dan Rooney of the Steelers don't like that. But the tradeoffs have to come somewhere.

Long ago, the players union lost the fight for guaranteed contracts which means football players are just about the only pro athletes anywhere who can be cut at any time, without any cost. You sign a bad contract -- see Mike Komisarek in hockey -- and you can get out of it the next day. Owners love that. Fans prefer that. Players hate it, but having lost that, they have to fight for something.

The smooth Goodell says he listens to the fans. "What I hear is they just want football. That's the focus both sides have to keep focus of. They want their football on Sunday, Monday and Thursdays."